ELENA NIKO

My name is Elena Koleva and if I want to, I can call Burj Khalifa “a girder in the sky”. I am a rebel and a freelance writer. I created the Word Park blog as a crossroad of my greatest passions: roaming around the edge of reality and mixing life and literature in a three-dimensional experience. I call it The Method of Full-Blooded Writing.

During my long trip as a journalist and writer for magazines like Max, AMICA & L’Europeo, I learned something important: juggling skillfully with words is not enough. If you want to have a distinguishable voice, you have to wave the red cape in front of them – like a matador. You have to tease the words. You have to make them angry. But most of all: you have to let words hurt you and hurt the audience. And let’s face it: there are millions of authors in the arena…

Now, as a blogger, my mission is to take you for a walk. Whether you’re a writer or an avid reader, we can jump over the barbed wire of reality together. Let’s make a deal: everything we can imagine is real and the best font is the way we move. It doesn’t hurt if you lose your ordinary world for a while and make new ones, trust me. The only veil that stands between them is your courage. I’ve been playing this game since I was a child and the rules are quite simple. All you have to do is look at the sentences as sacred playgrounds.

Yet no character can exist outside the context of a words, right? But the character always has a relationship to its surroundings and the easiest way to create a character is to become one.

Life is the source of literature. If you want to truly understand the protagonists in your stories or the ones from the novels you read, you should walk into their shoes and get to know their lifestyles. Where do they have dinner? Where do they shop for clothes? Would they steal a book? Who are they kissing? Try to follow their craziest desires and always remember that characters don’t need alibi… They can do almost anything they want because they can take far more severe consequences than you. But exactly like you - they can not act illogically! If they do, they become flat characters. In this section I will dress, speak, eat, move, love, travel and even bleed like different protagonists. Since I want to make them real, I should let them borrow my body for a while…

Welcome to the heavy industry of Love. Isn’t it great? Here the pain is morphine, the tears are еye drops and the paradise is a hopeless place. Hard love. It leaves you alone at the terminal of broken memories and it is stuck like a hook in your throat, dragging the long rope of doubts. Whether you want to write or read about it - love is the Great Catalyst in prose and can make buildings fall on the page… What? You’re not in love? Well, you can still be a voyeur, right? Even if the window, that you are looking at, is your own past or the past of others. Dare to breach the edgy surface of love and sink. But what if FUCKING BIG LOVE really hurts, crawls along frail realities, hides in shadows and is almost always irreversible? Hmmm, words grow like crazy in a soil like this.

Have you ever followed an occasional passer-by on the street just out of curiosity? Or because you are seduced by the way he holds his purse, by the buttons of his shirt or his perfectly designed happiness? Have you ever profiled people or felt like in a Shakespeare's play? Whether we write or read people, we all should take care of our personal collection of modern archetypes. They are our role models, aren’t they? And since everything can unlock our inspiration – clothing, movement, look, voice or word, keep your eyes wide open! Outliers is a place for people who inspire. People who step beyond the barbed wire of horizon. And who are ready to serve as living files of precious details.

The Method of Full-Blooded Writingis all you should learn in order to become a master in the forge of words. Let’s say you are a photographer and in your photos the blue must be bluer than the sapphire, bluer than the ocean, bluer than the bluest blue. The same goes for the craft of writing! Of course, on the page, the camera aperture is replaced by Her Majesty - The Metaphor. Let the shy nouns get out of their cages, the dashes – run faster than you and the verbs – scrape their knees in the rain. But wait! Is it enough to say “I am at ground zero of the sky” instead of “I begin to be happy”? In order to write catchy metaphors with flesh and bones, first you have to taste their meaning. Aren’t you tired of your own saliva?